


What's Not Televised

by Celandine



Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types
Genre: F/M, Ficlet, Mentor/Protégé, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-22
Updated: 2015-09-22
Packaged: 2018-04-22 22:29:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 399
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4852952
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Celandine/pseuds/Celandine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>All of Panem knows about Katniss's great romance with Peeta. What they don't know is what's not televised.</p>
            </blockquote>





	What's Not Televised

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Your Cruise Director (cruisedirector)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cruisedirector/gifts).



> Cruise Director said, "If you'll do Hunger Games I want Katniss/Haymitch (any way you want to interpret that), What's Not Televised." So here it is.

The Girl on Fire, that's what is televised. The Lover Boy. The great and hopeless romance of Peeta and Katniss.

For two years, two Hunger Games, that is what all of Panem believes.

What's not televised is equally hopeless, just not nearly as believable.

When Effie pulls Prim Everdeen's name out of the bowl at the reaping, Haymitch would have wept, if he weren't too drunk to be able to do anything but concentrate on standing up without falling on his face. He has seen forty-six tributes die under his mentorship, and Prim has less chance at victory than any one of her predecessors.

Katniss Everdeen's volunteering to take her sister's place is unheard-of. Haymitch knows her, slightly, as well as he knows anyone of her generation. She hunts with Gale Hawthorne and sells her catch in the Hob, where Haymitch buys his liquor, so he's seen her bargaining with Greasy Sae and others there.

She reminds him of himself. Prickly, wary, antagonistic. It's astonishing that Peeta Mellark loves her.

Or perhaps not. Because Haymitch does too.

The only chance she has to survive is through the plan that Haymitch and Peeta concoct: that great and hopeless romance.

If she lives, if she's the victor, then perhaps… Haymitch thinks.

And she does live. But so does Peeta. The one and only time two victors are permitted in the Games.

Haymitch crawls back into the bottle. Peeta and Katniss each move into the houses assigned them in Victors' Square, and he watches them, unable to stop himself, their every interaction another twist of the knife in his heart.

It only takes weeks, though, for the love story to fall apart once the cameras are gone, gone until the victory tour.

So what isn't televised is Katniss in Haymitch's house. She quarrels with him, throws cold water on him, drives him crazy. Crazier.

In amongst her exasperated conversation he picks out a few facts. What her father was like. Who are her friends, few though they are. Her inability to be around those in pain… which is like her mother and sister, but instead of wanting to fix physical pain, Katniss notices mental pain, and mostly runs from it.

Haymitch isn't sure why she doesn't run from him.

Katniss doesn't run even when he is so drunk one day on white liquor that he tells her how he feels.

She stays.


End file.
